Learning becomes meaningful and effective if students are
given the opportunity to link their school activities to real-life experience.
According to Westwater & Wolfe (2000:49) information that the brain
determines is important is much more likely to be attended to, stored, and later
retrieved than that which the brain decides is meaningless or of little
consequence. I invite English teachers to think about that whenever they
plan their classes and select the activities to be performed by their students.

Avoiding the study of isolated language forms represents a
first attempt towards more meaningful learning. Language is better learned when
students use the language to learn it. I urge teachers to trash lists of
decontextualized sentences and introduce meaningful tasks to teach English. What
about forgetting those lists of sentences to be put into the negative form and
use one of the tasks below?

1. Make up some wrong statements using the content of the
other subjects in school and ask your students to correct them by using
negative statements. In order to select the statements you can ask teachers
in your school to give you suggestions.

Ex. The Amazon River flows from northern Colombia across
northern Brazil.

The Amazon River does not flow from northern Colombia
across northern

Brazil. It flows from northern Peru across northern
Brazil.

2. Ask your students to interview their parents in order
to find out things they do not do, eat, like, want, etc. Students can
afterwards compare their results in order to find out what their fathers and
mothers have in common.

3. Ask pairs of students to draw pictures of their
bedrooms. Afterwards, ask them to use negative forms to talk about the
differences between them.

Other two aspects of learning that should be taken into
account are learning styles and multiple intelligences. Silver et al (2000:25)
divide learning styles into four main categories made up of a combination of
thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuition. They are: Mastery (sensing-thinking);
Interpersonal (sensing-feeling); Understanding (intuitive-thinking); and
Self-expression (intuitive-feeling). Gardner´s intelligences are:
verbal-linguistic; logical –mathematical; spatial; bodily-kinesthetic;
musical; interpersonal; intrapersonal and naturalistic.

We can provide students with activities that fuse multiple
intelligence and learning styles in a meaningful and practical way aiming at
"integrated learning" (Silver et al, 2000). We can also integrate
several intelligences and styles to develop different language skills. In the
examples below, you can find: (1) a combination of Mastery style, Spatial and
naturalistic Intelligences to develop vocabulary. (2) a combination of
interpersonal style, intrapersonal and naturalistic intelligences to develop
writing. (3) a combination of understanding style, verbal-linguistic and
logical-mathematical intelligences to develop reading. (4) a combination of
self-expressive style, verbal-linguistic and musical intelligences to develop
speaking.

(1) Draw a flowering plant and label its parts.

(2) Suppose you are a river and write a text describing how you feel when
people pollute water.

(3) Compare ads and try to match the ones which employ similar textual
formulae.

(4) Create a rap song to make up a recipe for a better world.

Use your imagination, try out other combinations and send your suggestions to
our Newsletter.